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Turtle Soup

A hearty soup made with meat, vegetables, tomatoes, and seasoned with Worcestershire sauce and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Put the meat in a pot of water and boil the pot.

  2. Add the lemon, potato, onion, tomatoes, bay leaves, and parsley, then boil all together for 3 hours.

  3. Brown the flour in a little butter, add some of the soup to the browned flour, and stir the mixture back into the pot.

  4. Boil slowly for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. In a tureen, place the chopped hard boiled egg, lemon slices, and chopped parsley.

  2. Season the soup with Worcestershire sauce and coarse sea salt, then strain the soup into the tureen.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Potato + tomatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Meat
Provides the base flavour and body of the broth as it simmers for hours.
Flour
Browned in butter and stirred in, it thickens the soup slightly.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and colour to the broth.
Potato
Softens during long simmering, adding body to the soup.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for 2 hours after adding the browned flour. Once the flour mixture is stirred in, the soup should simmer gently rather than boil hard. Vigorous boiling can break up the potato and cloud the broth, and steady low heat lets the flour thicken smoothly without lumps.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, potato, onion, tomato, parsley, flour, butter):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Coconutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, potato, onion, tomato, parsley, flour, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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